UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful

It seems that UNIX has become the victim of cancerous growth at the hands of
organizations such as UCB. 4.2BSD is an order of magnitude larger than Version
5, but, Pike claims, not ten times better.

The talk reviews reasons for UNIX's popularity and shows, using UCB
cat as a primary example, how UNIX has grown fat. cat isn't
for printing files with line numbers, it isn't for compressing multiple blank
lines, it's not for looking at non-printing ASCII characters, it's for
concatenating files.

We are reminded that ls isn't the place for code to break a single
column into multiple ones, and that mailnews shouldn't have its own
more processing or joke encryption code.

Rob carried the standard well for the "spirit of UNIX," and you can look
forward to a deeper look at the philosophy of UNIX in his forthcoming book.